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I made a short video on Animoto to see how long it would take

My experiment last week with Xtranormal

Last week I made a short video using the online Xtranormal tool. While it was fun up to a point, I decided it was a tad too beta for me to use right now for any business-related purpose.

Comparing with Animoto

Inevitably, I was comparing it with Animoto, which I first heard about late in 2007 and then posted about here, just over two years ago, with a very basic test video.

The comments on the post last week about the Xtranormal service prompted me to revisit Animoto last night and do yet another quick video, just by grabbing some images from my computer and selecting some music from the clips on offer from the Animoto site.

No Oscar for this production, but what might be of interest to others was how long it took, namely about 30 minutes. But about 20 minutes of that was searching for music – I think there was a *lot* of music there for Valentine’s Day. In the event, I picked something for the sound and ignored the title “A Night in the Park” which was not really spot on for a video featuring daytime beach scenes.

Both my previous experiment in 2008 and this one were done using the 30 second free version. After all this time I am seriously thinking of throwing caution to the winds and taking out a full access for one year subscription for the princely sum of $30.

A few of the things I like about Animoto:

* you can use their music or yours
* uploading images is easy (next I’ll have to try their video upload)
* sharing to YouTube was just a click (also in Xtranormal except it didn’t work there)

I’m thinking of some smart ways I can use Animoto, e.g. to kick off a couple of presentations I’m doing over the next couple of weeks. For that I’ll probably need to make that move sooner rather than later, from cheap (as in, free) to paid.

Why not create your own video slideshow at animoto.com?

Testing the online movie-making tool Xtranormal

This morning I had a direct message (DM) on Twitter with a link to a YouTube video advertising a Superbowl-related service. I clicked through out of curiosity and watched the short video.

If you watch that, you’ll notice the credit that comes up at the end for Xtra Normal, with the intriguing tagline “If you can type, you can make movies”.

I tried it out.

Signup was easy and free.

The interface and the various pre-fabricated scenes, avatars and so on reminded me a bit of Second Life (who ever talks about Second Life these days? Is it still there?) but at a really basic level.

I proceeded to type in a conversation about a topic that has been buzzing along in a forum on LinkedIn, viz. how can you tell if someone is a real social media expert.

Out of a bunch of quite bizarrely attired avatars I chose a couple of conservatively dressed types who looked more like humans than the avatars in the football item above. The result will not will me any prizes. It’s corny, not easy to see or hear, and I am including it here just to illustrate.

No matter what I did I could not get the avatars to the front of the scene as they are in the football item.

So there is a lack of flexibility in being able to mix and match avatars and settings.

No doubt a more skilled user would do something much more interesting and I’m inferring from the text accompanying the exhortation to download the desktop version that it may be possible to be more creative with that. But I looked at the resource specifications and decided I did not need the aggravation of my computer possibly seizing up or slowing to a crawl.

There is a link from the Xtranormal site for uploading to YouTube, but after following the instructions and trying several times, I gave up.

Verdict. Interesting, and I really like the idea of telling stories in novel ways like this, but at this stage Xtranormal is not a good use of my time.